Hi,

On Mon, 14 Dec 2009, Kendall Shaw wrote:

> I have a 300GB hard drive that I backup to a 600GB hard drive, but the
> initial full backup runs out of space (it takes almost twice as much
> space to hold the backup?).

Something sounds wrong there.  Are you saying that a single volume for a
single backup is more than twice the size of the data being backed up? Do
you have compression on? Perhaps you might want to post the log message
from the backup, the job config and the output of "df -h" on the computer.  

> So, I'd like to allow the backup to span more than one hard drive. I
> read something like a solution on this list, involving creating files
> for bacula to use as volumes, with symbolic links to the hard drive
> that the fiel should be stored on.

That's one way alright but it sounds a bit time consuming.  Another way
would be to use LVM to create a filesystem which spans the disks and use
disk volumes normally on that.  The trouble with either approach is that if
you have a single full backup spanned across two disks and you lose either
of your hard drives, you've lost some of your data.  Spanning the backup
over multiple volumes on multiple disks is probably easier to recover the
remaining data than with LVM, but neither is a great backup.

> An additional detail is that I use a scheme were I do a full backup
> once (ever) and then only incremental and differential after that,
> reusing volumes each week.

It's up to you of course, but I'm not sure this is a wise scheme.  How do
you ever free up space from old backups?  You can't ever delete the
original full backup or all of the incrementals and differentials that
follow it will be useless.  You can, I guess, have an ever growing
differential, but over time that will start to look like a full backup as
30%,40%,50%,.... of the data you backup has changed since the original
full.

Gavin


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